Category Archives: poetry

favorite poetry

“Seared With a Hot Iron”

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A blogging friend of mine, Hibah Shabkez, a beautiful and brilliant young woman from India, offered several years ago a powerful thoughr about the human tendency to isolate him/herself in a carefully-guarded and deadly point of view:

When you touch the edge of something hot—a frying-pan, a clothes-iron—you gasp and flinch away, before the knowledge, before the shock and the hurt and the searing of flesh. Locked in the thumping of your heart then, there is the secret triumph of assault successfully withstood, the inexpressible comfort of knowing it could not and cannot hurt you because you did and can again make it stop. But the drenching heat of liquid cannot be flung off, only sponged and coaxed away from the skin. And so they say doodh ka jala, chhaachh bhi phook phook kar peeta hai. (Urdu translation, “Once bitten, twice shy.”) It doesn’t take all men, you see, it takes only one; and just so, it takes only one vile lie to break a language’s heart.

When first you write a lie, a real lie and not simply a truth incognito, whether it be falsehood or treacherous half-truth, language recoils from you in pain, vowing never to trust you with words again. But if you must go on writing lies, for money or grundy-respect, seize the language and let it feel the sting and the trickling fear of the skin parting company with the flesh, over and over repeatedly, as you hold it unscreaming under the current. You must let body and mind and heart and soul be quite maimed then, until there is no difference left for any of them between truth and lie, between the coldness of lassi (urdu–”buttermilk”) and the heat of milk-tides rising from the saucepan. Thereafter you may plunder with impunity all of language and force it to house your lies. And if you will never again find words to tell a truth in, it will not matter, for you will have no truths left to tell. (https://nightingaleandsparrow.com/scarzone/)

https://cloverandwhite.wordpress.com/2019/12/22/nestling-by-hibah-shabkhez/;

https://nightingaleandsparrow.com/;

An “Deux ex Machina” is needed!

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The ancient Greek dramatists often employed an “Deux ex Machina” when the plot reached an insoluble dilemma. The Gods would descend on a platform from above the stage and peremptorily resolve the impasse presented in the drama. This mechanical contrivance…and it was literally “mechanical”…would then offer a solution to the incomprehensible matter that the dramatist had woven into the plot This was an example of a “divine intervention” in which the gods would intervene into a plot dilemma. The Greeks understood that from time to time the plot of the human predicament in which we are implicated cannot be resolved without an heavenly intrusion.

My country is living in one of these moments. Trump’s insanity is becoming more and more intense with the assistance of “Trump Lite” in the form of Elon Musk and his coterie of acolytes. Oh let it be that an “deux ex machina” here be employed by the Gods and suddenly bring Kamala Harris onto the stage and kick Trump’s ass and his demonic minions into oblivion!

The Visitation of Poetry on a Meagre Life

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“Poetry” first visited mere nearly 35 years ago and my life has never been the same. I’m not a poet, but a devotee to the art, and an appreciator of the following poet and his beautiful, profound personal note following this “Rattle” post today:

T.R. Hummer
SURGE
At the Senior Center, nobody is playing cards. The tables are folded and leaned against the wall; the Queen of Hearts is stuffed in a box upside-down and backward, jammed between a joker and the three of clubs. Down the street, the local diner is emptier than a Hopper painting, bacon grease coagulating in a cold tin can. No one in the shops, no one on the street except one black-masked old man in a worn peacoat with a dog-eared paperback stuffed in one pocket, sitting on a bus stop bench, clenching his fists and weeping. This is the way contagion works. The tears of the poet were in the reader all along. —from Rattle #78, Winter 2022
 
T.R. Hummer: “Having been writing poetry seriously for over 50 years, I have belatedly come to the same conclusion I came to when I was in my 20s: I don’t write poetry; poetry writes me. When I was young, I knew that but misunderstood it; now I misunderstand it in a completely different way. Then, I wanted poetry to remake me in some radical and idealized way that was beyond me to do on my own. Now, I feel it in what I imagine to be Heraclitus’s way: ‘Listening not to me, but to the logos, it is wise to agree that all things are one.’ At 22, I would have thought that sentence was a three-part non sequitur; now, I simply concur.”

The Dilemma of Human Connection

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Loneliness does not come from having no people around but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding views which are different from others.   Carl Jung

Solitude is very important, but so is social interaction and connection.  We are hard-wired to learn engagement with our fellow humans as our Creator knew, and knows, that one cannot be human without other people.  It is often a challenge to mature to the point of finding a home between these two extremes.  If we err toward the solitude, psychosis will be the result, relevant to an old bromide, “The one who lives by himself and for himself will be spoiled by the company he keeps.”  But the opposite extreme is equally deadly as the social demand to “fit in” can become so important that one has no solitude at all and the whole of his/her life can be marching in lockstep with the dictates of the tribe.  Group psychosis is equally deadly but is not recognized by those who have been consumed by the group.

The challenge of any group dynamic to lessen the risk of soul-destroying loneliness, especially on the family level, is to create an environment where each individual learns he/she has a voice and that this voice will be respected. Without this dynamic, sterility will set in and death-wielding toxicity will result. Paul Tillich called this toxic environment, an “empty world of self-relatedness.”

Vaclav Havel on Hope

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Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good, not because it stands for a chance to succeed. (Vaclav Havel)

“Hope is a state of mind, not of the world” and I would add, “a ‘mind’ working in harmony with a heart.”  This hope is grounded in the Spiritual, a Divinely inspired, intuitive understanding that is not based in what is so often an ersatz “joy” of the common-sense reality that most of us call home.  “Joy” is very wonderful but we often fall victim to a common-sense definition of that word which is but a quest for what C.S. Lewis called, ”a quest for immediate gratification over a believed-in pattern of glory.” Hope is most real when we face the grim dirge of hopelessness when circumstances seem beyond the pale of any rational hope.

Here is one of my favorite poetic approaches to this hope/hopelessness continuum from the pen of T. S. Eliot in “East Coker,” one of “The Four Quartets”:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

(AFTERTHOUGHT—Havel was the last president of Czechoslovakia, and then the Czech Republic, serving from 1989-2003.  He was an author, a playwright, and memoroist whose literary skills were used to criticize the totalitarian Communist regime that oppressed Eastern Europe.)

The Southern Baptist Church And Sexual Abuse

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The Southern Baptist Convention is being racked…again…by its history of sexual abuse and systematic efforts at covering it up.  I grew up in a Southern Baptist church….mine a split-off from the SBC which it castigated for being “too liberal”….and I know a lot about “hiding stuff.”  My life has been one ego-driven cover-up which is now mercifully being shredded, a dissolution allowing me to see, and even experience, what I so glibly back then described as “the Grace of God.”

Religion, in all forms and expressions, is subject to the whole gamut of “sins of the flesh.”  The riotousness of my  youth and most of my life was covered up with an hypocritical need to “not be found out.”  This is just the “sin” of being human as, per T.S. Eliot, “humankind cannot bear very much reality.”  This is because if we allow reality to intrude into our little self-serving fortress, ou r facade would be in jeopardy and it is easier to just deny what is so very obvious to others.  This “intrusion,” if and when it comes, is always frightening, motivating our “flesh” dimension to double-down in its denial system.  This violation, though, I now realize can be a visitation from “the Spirit of God.”

In the following link, you can read a report of a former notable Southern Baptist Church leader, Russell Moore, castigating his erstwhile church for its hypocrisy on the matter of sexual abuse.  But the “hypocrisy” goes much further than sexuality as this church, like all religious traditions often falls prey to the very human temptation to use spirituality as a facade to cover up “the flesh,” whereas the Gospel taught us we could opt for more human-ness—vulnerability, anxiety, and even despair as the Spirit of God does Her work on us.

A caveat is in order.  Today, long past my Baptist years and its fundamentalism, I am still very proud of that tradition which offered me a “hunger and thirst after righteousness” which is being somewhat sated as I wrestle with that “beast” called “humility.” (See T.S. Eliot quote at conclusion.)  This tradition offered me the gift of Holy Writ, only the Bible at that point, but also an intuitive insight that there is more to the whole of life than the perfunctory.

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T. S. Eliot, “Oh the shame of motives late revealed, and the awareness of things ill-done, and done to others harm, which once you took for exercise of virtue.” (The Four Quartets)

Link to news story about the SBC sex scandal—https://www.rawstory.com/southen-baptists-abuse/

Borges, Jung, and Individuation

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Time is the substance I am made of.  Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger;  It is the fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.  Jorge Luis Borges

I often have second thoughts when I post here on this blog.  Last week when I offered this wisdom of Jorge Luis Borges I had another flurry of recriminations stemming from the childhood fear, “Oh, my this is just too crazy to be thinking.”  I now realize that in my very early life I feared I was not “thinking right” but had an uncanny awareness of this “flaw” and so quickly set my precocious little mind/heart dynamo to learning how to “think right.”  And I’m glad I did as otherwise I would have had a very hard time finding a place in the world in which I found myself and would have created great difficulty for myself and others, especially my family.  But as I hyper focused on thinking, and behaving, in the “right way” I did subscribe to linearity but with some reservation, a hesitancy which has dissipated here in my later years.

Borges with this astute poetic observation put into words the profound Mystery I discovered upon my birth in 1952.  And, yes, it was a “discovery” even then as my innocent little mind/heart contrivance was alive and kicking, and had been even in the womb, as it is with all of us…… and the conclusions we draw shape the balance of our lives.  These “conclusions” are in the realm of perception which precedes cognition, a realm which will then shape the cognitive framework we formulate. Depending upon our neurological wiring and the familial/cultural environment in which we find ourselves, we can often find ourselves “hard-wired” in a cognitive framework from which we can never escape.  This framework is an algorithm which will dictate how we think and seek to make sure that we think in an “appropriate” way as defined by the social venue in which we find ourselves ensconced. We are then set on the path in which the Jungian phenomenon of individuation is challenging or even impossible.  The resulting quandary will be my focus next time.

Jorge Luis Borges Summarizes Life

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Time is the substance I am made of.  Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger;  It is the fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.  Jorge Luis Borges

I’ve stumbled across Borges for decades and appreciated his wisdom, but this little poem totally grabbed me this morning, encouraging me to “wikipedia” him.  I’m glad for this brief Wikipedia venture into his very profound, complicated, and even troubling life.

“Time is the substance I am made of” is a description of our physical existence, the mundane life that we all live.  But when I call it “mundane” I say that only for emphasis to point out its other dimension, that “river which sweeps me along.”  It is this “river” that makes this otherwise “mundane” world Sublime if we ever deign to look beneath the surface of life as Borges did.  In a sense this “mundane” world is the only one that “is” but it is the Sublime that gives it value if we ever find the courage and humility to let Her peek into our lives. There is more to life than meets the eye.  But it is human nature to prefer “what meets the eye” without any further inquiry, any “internal dialogue” as Hannah Arend put it in her study of Nazi totalitarianism.  We prefer to see only the “small bright circle of our consciousness” rather than to acknowledge that “beyond lies the darkness.”

Borges here puts into words the infinite complexity of this “fall” into existence which we know as Life. At one time in my life I would have wanted to run screaming from the classroom where a teacher had presented this little poem, perhaps looking back and flashing a sign of the cross. Borges puts on the table for us a complexity which the rational mind cannot comprehend, but which, if we have the courage and humility, can read between the lines and see it only as a pointer to the Ultimate, Iliminatible, Mystery of Life..

Miguel de Unamnuno Wisdom

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“One must look for the eternal in the alluvium of the insignificant, in that which revolves around the eternal like an erratic comet, without ever entering its ordered constellation.” This great Spanish mystic/philosopher from the early 20th century grasped what C.S. Lewis described as the “sin of misplaced concreteness.” Our hard-wired familiarity with the mundane of this beautiful world in which we live can keep us from paying “attention” to the Life flowing around us often in the most easily overlooked phenomena of our day to day life. The “ordered constellation” of the mundane is certainly important; but if we never learn to meditate, perhaps on something as mundane as a flickering candle flame, or the giggles of a baby, or the “birds of the air…and the flowers of the field”, we will need to ponder the profound question of humans, like Jesus, who have asked, “What shall it profit a man/woman if s/he gains the whole world and loses his/her own soul, or what shall a human give in exchange for his/her soul?” Western culture assuages its rapacity with an attraction for “stuff,” failing to appreciate Shakespeare’s parallel quip to the Jesus-question above, “Within be rich, without be fed no more.”

A “Merry Christmas” Thought For My Readers!

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In the presidential campaign of 2008 Barack Obama was overheard dismissing people who “cling to guns and religion.”  He was quickly attacked by the right wing for this perceived slight, not understanding that it was the “clinginess” that was the issue he had in mind; he understood that guns and religion should not be “clung to.” Guns are alright, being intrinsically innocent as is any object. Religion too is alright but not when it becomes an addiction as has been the case in the “right to bear arms” movement. When religion becomes an addiction it can obliterate the wisdom of spiritual teachers such as Jesus Christ.

Addiction is deadly in any form.  If one becomes addicted to an idea it can have the same lethal result as drugs, or alcohol, or even sex. This is vividly illustrated in the following photo in which a Republican Congressman, Thomas Massie, posted on Twitter a family photo of he and his wife, along with their five children, displaying assault rifles before a Christmas tree. Two days later another Republican, Congresswoman Lauren Boebert, followed suit with a photo of her family proudly displaying their weapons before a Christmas tree.  

On this Christmas morning, I am deeply moved with memories of this holiday, thrilled as I watch Handel’s Messiah with my lovely wife and doggie. This “birth of Christ” day has greater value for me each year as I approach my divinely allotted, “three-score and ten.” It honors an event two millennia in the past in which an irruption took place in a culture that was as frozen as ours is today, frozen in a gridwork of unexamined premises which always culminate in some form of violence.  This Christmas story is a lasting illustration of a man who announced in his words and deeds, “Hey, guys there is another way of looking at things, of seeing others with respect, appreciation, and love as it dawns on us, ‘hey, what we see is what we are’. He knew those persons we dismiss, fear, and even hate merit something other than the rage with which we usually respond.”

This different approach to that “gridwork” and its ugliness requires something Massie and Boebert lack–an ability to have an impulse and not pause a moment to consider, “Is it true, is it kind, is it necessary.” The story of Jesus is about finding the courage to recognize the gridwork in which we live and choose to not march lock-step to its dictates. This takes courage, respect, forgiveness, and humility. It shows us that we must “get over ourselves” from time to time and how painful this ego death can be.

A resounding “Merry Christmas” I offer to each of you.